I am a visiting student from the University in Augsburg, Germany. In 2019, I started a teaching degree program majoring in English and History to eventually acquire my teaching license for Bavarian high schools. Despite me being a big enthusiast of both subjects, my personal research interest certainly targets history.

In the context of working as a student assistant for Prof. Dr. Marita Krauss at the department of European Regional History / Bavarian and Swabian Regional History at the University of Augsburg, I developed my idea for a thesis that emerged from a project that I have been working on for more than a year. In this project, the history of Feldafing, a village near Munich, is being researched with a special focus on the time before and after WW2. Right from the get-go, I concentrated on a topic of Feldafing that I found particularly interesting: a large Jewish Displaced Persons Camp which was established on the premises of a former Nazi school after the liberation. Thanks to a huge variety of sources (from reports of the Office of Military Government, camp files made available through the YIVO Institute located in NYC, files in local archives to several oral history interviews) I was able to gain extensive insights into the administrative structures of the camp, but also learned about personal stories which ultimately inspired me to chose my thesis topic dealing with the 1st and 2nd generation of Jewish DPs. A very enriching experience along the way was the possibility to arrange a meeting of around 20 descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were once born in the Feldafing DP Camp and emigrated to Israel and the USA after having spent their first years after liberation in Germany. I was able to conduct extensive interviews with members of this 2nd generation which proved to be a very valuable resource for my thesis.

While my previous research interest thus certainly centers around German-speaking Europe in the 19th and 20th century as well as Modern Jewish history, I am also eager to learn about and discover new research directions focusing on other periods during my time at Emory. I feel very honored and grateful to be given this opportunity to deepen my knowledge and do more research in history for two semesters here at Emory as a non-degree-seeking student. I am sure that this experience abroad at Emory will be an experience of a lifetime, in terms of both academia and grand life experiences more generally.